A lack of commitment

Springfield drops the ball on promised east-side community center

Three years ago, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin gave hope to
Springfield's east side.

He promised the city's most neglected residents
that he would help them build a much-needed community center, and he
delivered. Durbin announced with great fanfare at a Springfield press
conference that he had secured an initial $750,000 for the project and that
the Boys & Girls Club would take the lead.

Things got off to a rocky start when the Springfield
Ministerial Alliance — whose members reportedly initiated the project
in October 2003 and helped acquire the federal funding — accused the
Boys & Girls Club of stealing the reins of the project. When the
alliance moved to form its own nonprofit group, the Community Center
Foundation, Durbin's office assured the ministers that the Boys &
Girls Club had a top-notch fundraising record and was the best for the job.

The dispute was smoothed over, and the two groups
worked together to formulate plans for the 40,000-square-foot building,
slated to cost between $5 million and $10 million. But the project still
stalled.

Last year, Kristin Allen, executive director of the
Boys & Girls Club, told Illinois Times that additional funds had still not been pledged and
a building site had not been chosen [see Amanda Robert, "Stepping
Up," July 12, 2007].

As of last week, nothing had changed.

Dr. W.G. Robinson-McNeese, president of the
Springfield Ministerial Alliance, said Monday that the partners the Boys
& Girls Club had been seeking had been slow in signing on and extending
financial support. Because the organization couldn't secure
additional funds in a timely manner, he explained, the community
center's federal grants — which included an extra $200,000
allocated this year — were in jeopardy.

"The money that had come to the project from
Sen. Durbin's office essentially had a time attached to it,"
Robinson-McNeese said. "My understanding is that once the money is
allocated something has to be done with it. If nothing is done with it, it
goes back or has to be reallocated."

Calls to Durbin's office and Allen
weren't returned until Tuesday. Allen acknowledged that both Durbin
and the Boys & Girls Club were disappointed with the status of the
community center's funding, but said she hoped that the senator would
stand by his commitment.

Late Tuesday, Durbin's office issued a press
release, announcing that all of the funds would now be set aside for the
Edwin Watts Southwind Park. There was enough excitement about the community
center, he said, but not enough outside financial support to take the
project to the next level.

"The concept of a quality facility for kids and
families on the east side of the city is one that I look forward to
supporting in the future," Durbin said in the release, "when
the community has gathered the kind of broad-based financial support needed
to make such a project a success."

Allen said the Boys & Girls Club never expected
that the project would be finished anytime soon, especially after such
organizations as the city of Springfield, the Sangamon County Department of
Public Health, and the Springfield Park District — one of the primary
backers of the Southwind project — wouldn't commit.

"We asked for firm commitments and decisions,
and none of those partnering entities that we have been working with in the
past several years indicated that they are able to make those financial
commitments and resources to help create the center," she said.

Despite its financial glitches, the Boys & Girls
Club will move forward with plans to build a community center on
Springfield's east side. It won't be exactly the same model
originally envisioned, Allen said; instead, it will be scaled down to 8,000
to 10,000 square feet. The community center will house the
organization's American Business Club unit (which donated $250,000 to
the project in 2005), as well as programming space for Senior Services of
Central Illinois and Springfield School District 186.

The next step for the Boys & Girls Club is to
present its new plan and to identify additional private and corporate
sponsors. The organization has also considered new appropriate building
sites for their scaled-down design, Allen added, but the board has not
finalized a decision.

Robinson-McNeese told Illinois
Times Wednesday that the Ministerial
Alliance has other ideas. The alliance isn't happy that the community
center lost the money, he said, but the ministers would like to take
advantage of the opportunity to go back to the drawing board. The alliance
has recently approached several people with an interest in signing on to
the project, he said.

"We have been talking about the year of
reconciliation and doing things together, so maybe this can be tangible
evidence of that," Robinson-McNeese said. "Maybe we can join
together as a large group of churches and push forward this initiative for
the community center."

Even though the Boys & Girls Club has refocused
on a new plan for the east-side community center, Robinson-McNeese said,
the alliance would rather continue with what they initially envisioned for
the project.

"The Ministerial Alliance would like to see the
original plan with a much larger community center with broader
utilities," he said. "Right now we're thinking of going
in a different direction."